Promising efforts to accurately identify early Diabetic Retinopathy changes

The Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences is working on developing a non-invasive system for the early and accurate diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. Dr. Shlomit Schaal, M.D., Ph.D.  is the clinical principal investigator and Ayman El-Baz, Ph.D. is the engineering principal investigator. Promising early data that was recently analyzed revealed accurate identification of diabetes changes in the retina in more than 97% of the subjects. These early changes could have not been identified without the use of the novel software.

Shlomit Schaal, M.D., Ph.D., and Ayman El-Baz, Ph.D. are working together on a novel project that may early identify changes in the retina of diabetic patients. “The main goal of this project is to develop a clinically usable software for the early detection of diabetic retinal diseases using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)”, said Dr. Schaal.

The research study provides new laboratory-based measures that allow an automatic accurate diagnosis of early changes in the retina in diabetic patients. The OCT data will be obtained from patients seen at the Diabetes Excellence Center, at the UMass Chan Medical School, using a state-of-the-art OCT machine.

This is a collaborative research project between Ayman El-Baz, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Louisville, KY and his experienced image processing research team at the department of bioengineering at the J.B. Speed School of Engineering at the University of Louisville and the research team at Dr. Schaal’s lab at the UMass Chan Medical School. The cutting-edge research is funded by the Coulter Translational Partnership Foundation. Patients who are interested in further details regarding this project may contact us or e-mail us at eyedoctors@umassmed.edu.